Legally blind since age 18, my father missed out on the first digital revolution.
“Is it ‘Electra?’” my father asks, leaning in close to the Amazon Echo my mother has just installed. Leaning in close is his trademark maneuver: Dad has been legally blind since age 18, the result of a horrible car crash in 1954. He has lived, mostly successfully, with limited vision for the 64 years since. “Call it the right name!”… read more
Twenty years ago, another high-profile tech executive testified before Congress. It was a more innocent time.
Twenty years and a month ago, Bill Gates, then chairman and CEO of Microsoft, made his first appearance before Congress. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gates defended against the accusation that his company was a monopoly. Antitrust investigations into the company had been ongoing for almost a decade by then, since the George H.W. Bush administration. The ubiquity… read more
After a shooting at YouTube’s corporate campus, technology CEOs offer platitudes. Shouldn’t they have more to say?
I always wince when I see someone lament that “there are no words” to express something. Words: These are the tools humans possess, before all others, for expression. To claim that they have no power is to forsake the mutual compassion that communication affords. And so I winced on Tuesday, upon seeing nearly identical responses to the YouTube shooting from… read more
A 50-year-old philosophical thought experiment has been central to the debate about autonomous vehicles. It’s time to give it up.
You know the drill by now: A runaway trolley is careening down a track. There are five workers ahead, sure to be killed if the trolley reaches them. You can throw a lever to switch the trolley to a neighboring track, but there’s a worker on that one as well who would likewise be doomed. Do you hit the switch… read more
A recent ransomware attack on Atlanta’s computer systems is disruptive, but so ordinary.
Want to hear a boring story? I can’t submit an expense report for a recent out-of-town work trip. I’ve got all the receipts, except one from long-term parking at the Atlanta airport. A sensor lets me in and out of the parking lot there, and my account gets charged automatically. Later, I can download a receipt from a website, which… read more
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying.
For a spell during 2010 and 2011, I was a virtual rancher of clickable cattle on Facebook. It feels like a long time ago. Obama was serving his first term as president. Google+ hadn’t arrived, let alone vanished again. Steve Jobs was still alive, as was Kim Jong Il. Facebook’s IPO hadn’t yet taken place, and its service was still… read more
A pedestrian killed by a self-driving Uber in Tempe shows that the legal implications of autonomous cars are as important, if not more so, than the technology.
On Sunday night, a self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a pedestrian, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, on North Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona. It appears to be the first time an automobile driven by a computer has killed a human being by force of impact. The car was traveling at 38 miles per hour. An initial investigation by Tempe… read more
Piaggio, the Italian company that makes Vespa scooters, is building cargo droids for city pedestrians.
“This is gita.” Jeffrey Schnapp pronounces the “T” in the crisp, Italian way—near the teeth rather than the soft palate—which makes me feel like I should have worn more expensive shoes to the meeting. Gita is a bulbous lozenge of a robot, about two feet tall, with rubber tires at its edges so it can spin around within its own… read more
Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.
“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms… read more
A New York Times exposé of a “black market” for online fame diagnoses the symptom of social-media despair, but misses its cause.
In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?”… read more